Q: You headed Chrysler in the early eighties and turned the company around during a financial crisis that nearly killed it. Did you keep any souvenirs in your garage?
A: I have a Viper and one of the last wooden K cars, a convertible. That’s all I kept—a Woodie and a Viper.

Q: The Viper’s so you can race on Sunset Boulevard, right?
A: Well, most of the time I have a driver. But when I drive, I have a Chrysler 300. Nice car. A fully loaded luxury car for $35,000. That’s a good value.

Q: Why just those wheels? Nothing new-fangled?
A: I’m studying hybrids. That’s the wave of the future. That’s almost ready. Everything that’s going on in the world is oil.

Q: Even though Chrysler’s just been sold by a German company to a private-equity group, are you still loyal to the Big Three?
A: Yeah, but I don’t know what the future holds. If the U.S. automakers don’t get some big concessions [from the unions] soon, the industry will die, little by little.

Q: You’ve sat across the table from any number of union leaders—even Jimmy Hoffa. Any idea what happened to him?
A: I was in the restaurant where he got abducted from on the day it happened. They never found his body, but they were pouring all that concrete for that new highway right through the area where he got abducted. I always speculated that it would be a natural place to dump somebody.

Q: Jack Nicholson played Hoffa a while back—maybe he knows something.
A: I once went to a party Jack Nicholson was at, at a friend of mine’s house in Beverly Hills. I was wearing my brown-and-white saddle shoes, and he had black-and-white. So even before we got to know each other, I said, “I like your shoes!” He said, “I like yours, too.”

Q: Your new book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, is full of good business sense. What’s the most important advice you’ve gotten?
A: My first boss at Ford, Charlie Beacham, said, “If you don’t know a dollop of horseshit from a dollop of vanilla ice cream, you’ve got a problem. You’ll never figure it out.” And my father would say, “Just don’t worry about day-to-day. Live life to the fullest every day. The sun’s going to come out—always does.”

Q: In the Vietnam War documentary The Fog of War, your old boss Robert McNamara, who became the secretary of defense, seems like a poignant, broken figure.
A: He was a brilliant guy—head of the World Bank, president of Ford—but he’ll always be remembered as the guy who screwed up Vietnam.

Q: People who recall your endorsement of President Bush might presume you were a Texas-style Republican who laughed through the oil crisis.
A: I campaigned for George because I knew his mother and dad for 30 years, and I figured he was from pretty good stock. But Jeb was being groomed too—they got the wrong kid. There’s something wrong philosophically with how Bush’s brain works—I feel sorry for him. I used to think Gore was nuts in his worrying about global warming, but he was ahead of his time.